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Saturday, July 16, 2016

the ALLIED HOLOCAUST : pure penicillin, for only some

The Nazis never fully carried out their original Hunger Plan and the Allies never carried out their original Penicillin plan.

So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.

But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.
Fortunately in the end, wartime penicillin became a moral triumph - a rare one in that morally squalid war - and a 'disgusting' affront to everything that Modernity stood for and an affront to Modernity supporters on all sides of WWII.

But by war's end, Modernity defenders no longer dared not say so, but instead merely lick their wounds silently as the world, their world until then, shifted tectonically beneath their feet.

For wartime penicillin was not a pure patented synthetic, made by 'the smartest chemists in the civilized human universe'.

Rather it was the impurely mixed, slimy, smelly, PD, natural effluent of simplest dumbest smallest microbes.

It was not made, during the war, in small amounts, profitably patented, and only used to quickly return lightly infected and wounded Allied soldiers to combat, so as to prevent upper middle class Allied youths being called up to replace them.

Yet one of the key lessons of WWI that the medical world had fully absorbed was that the war made the Spanish Flu much much worst than it already was.

As in most past wars throughout history, this war-spread infection preying up the worn out and hungry killed far more than the combat deaths of the war itself.

Most of its actual deaths were only the indirect result of the flu virus - pneumonia bacteria taking advantage of the situation was the actual killer and in 1943, penicillin was far and away the best way to stop pneumonia bacteria in its tracks.

The Allies fully expected some sort of infectious pandemic during the war or in its messy aftermath, so why they hoped to leave it to the rapidly failing Sulfa family of drugs to do all the heavy lifting is beyond criminal.

Fortunately and in a complete reversal, penicillin's wartime production was scaled up a thousand fold from the original plans and made abundant enough - and cheap enough - to be given to all, even during a total war.

No pandemic occurred in this world war, unlike the previous.

In fact, the fact that it was to be given to all, even during a total war, was deliberately highly publicized.

All because it was quickly apparent that this airlifting of penicillin to the world's dying was the first believable example to doubters that the Allies actually meant all that high flowing talk from their 1941 Atlantic Charter.

Now naturally impure penicillin was being given to badly wounded Allied troops and to Allied POWs ; to Allied civilians poor as well as rich, 'unfit' as well as 'fit', 'useless' as well as 'useful'.

To civilians in Neutral countries, to civilians in liberated lands, even to enemy wounded soldiers and enemy civilians.

Naturally, because the intellectual bread of Nobel committees always ends up somehow buttered side down, their prize went to the losing side, to Fleming & Florey.

Their eugenically-bounded side had been backed by virtually all the scientific and medical elites in every Allied nation.

Fleming and Florey had worked very hard to delay the widespread wartime use of naturally impure PD penicillin.

They wanted instead that wartime penicillin be first synthesized pure and patentable, no matter how long that took. (Almost ninety years on from Fleming's original discovery, it still hasn't happened.)

Even then, this pure 'fit' penicillin was to be made, during wartime, only in small amounts : just enough to allow 'fit' young 1As soldiers to survive to reproduce and 'save the race', not to save unfit 4Fs civilians and thus allow them to further 'swamp the race'.

Tolerance of mass death, 'for the greater eugenic good', was the moral value that Allied and Axis elites held in common and it was only by mere luck and the gumption of a dying doctor (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) that we remember the horror of Pure Auschwitz and not that of Pure Penicillin...

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About Me

I write, urgently, about our world's painfully too-slow transition into a new era, the Age of Entanglement. Ironically - and typically - this supposed new era actually represents a modified return to the world's oldest philosophy.
For the ancients almost universally saw all life as thoroughly entangled, saw all lifeforms as dining together at a common table - open commensality on a global scale.
Today’s science demonstrates that for us to survive on Earth, humans must sustain the lifeforms that in turn sustain us . So, for example, for us to kill the ocean’s upper reaches will soon remove the very oxygen we need to live.
And economics confirms we can not afford to replace the tens of trillions of dollars of free goods that Nature effortlessly provides humanity annually : there is no “Mars Plan B”.